The New Pictures

Dangerous Journey (20th Century-Fox) is a travel picture made by Armand and Leila Roosevelt Denis, producers of the magnificent Dark Rapture (1938). Among its glimpses of the Belgian Congo, the Ganges, Ceylon and Burma there are only a few shots which, in the words of Baedeker, need detain the tourist. But these few make the picture worth seeing. Best:

P: The gigantic, incredibly handsome Watusi tribesmen (featured at length in Dark Rapture); the pursuit and capture of a wild elephant (a sequence lifted bodily from the older film).

P:A Burmese girl from whom, coil by heavy coil, the brass wire of her immemorial feminine bondage is unwound, baring a deformed neck almost too weak to sustain her emancipated head.

P: A petrifying few minutes in which a Burmese priestess of fertility entices a reeling, slavering, divine king cobra from his cave, reverently kisses him three times on the brow.

Thunder Rock (Charter Films), an odd one made in England two years ago, combines, in equal parts, theatrical rigor mortis with some unusually intense acting and sincere thinking. Its story:

An antifascist journalist (Michael Redgrave) who raged through the 1930s with a Cassandra's customary success, retires to sit out World War II on Thunder Rock, in a Great Lakes lighthouse. Embittered, soaked with liquor and self-pity, he is content to let the world go hang. While it hangs, he entertains himself by conjuring up in his imagination a number of immigrants from Europe who drowned near his lighthouse a century ago. Before long they all but take on flesh & blood, act out for him the tragedies and the defeats of their own lifetimes.

One (Barbara Mullen), a heartbroken feminist, fled from the contemptuous jails of England. One (Frederick Cooper), a consumptive workman, fled from the inhumanities of a Victorian factory. One (Frederick Valk), a Viennese physician who prediscovered anesthesia, fled from the bigotries of the clergy and of his own profession. All, as the moved journalist hears them out, rebuke themselves and him for despair against whatever odds. The despairing promethean, they assure him, takes nothing of value to his living grave; others--a Darwin, a Pasteur, a Marx, a Nightingale--persist and by slow stages liberate the reluctant world. By morning and story's end, the journalist has recovered his soul, his hope, his manhood.

As a play (by Robert Ardrey) Thunder Rock flopped in Manhattan, but ran long & loud in London. As cinema, its prospects are unpredictable. Like the play, it suffers from naive lubberliness, reminiscent of Eugene O'Neill at his worst. But it also has some of the most stinging and salutary talk about prewar blindness, postwar prospects and their causes which has ever reached the timid screen. Its edged, cultivated production and its heartfelt acting--particularly that of brilliant Barbara Mullen--also help to turn the struggle of the protagonists into drama a fraction as searching and noble as the author intended.

Youth Runs Wild (RKO-Radio) is not to be confused with the sort of catch penny cinemalpractice which such a title normally suggests. It is, to be sure, a story of wartime juvenile delinquency, and a rather scrambled one at that. But Youth Runs Wild, for all its clumsiness, is remarkably full of warmth, of life, and of real cinematic sensitiveness. Credit for its awkward grace is due in part to a round dozen of its little-known players, in part to its scripters and director and cameraman, but most of all to 40-year-old Producer Val Lewton, nephew of Alia Nazimova.

Up to now Producer Lewton has wrung an impressive amount of blood out of such turnipy titles as The Curse of the Cat People and The Seventh Victim. He did so largely, as he says, by placing "very ordinary normal people in extraordinary situations." This new film is his first, uneven attempt to show normal people in normal situations. It investigates two working-class families, the steady Hausers, who are old inhabitants of Euclid Street, and the unstable Taylors, newcomers whom war has brought to be next door neighbors. The Hauser parents, both hard at work in a war plant, are eager for their son to finish school. But Frank (Glenn Vernon) is far more eager to earn money, out of restiveness, and because his friends do, and because of Sarah Taylor (Tessa Brind), the gentle, neglected child next door. Both get into bad company (Bonita Granville and some able supporters). Both "have ugly moments with their parents and at a drinking joint, and in an attempt at larceny, both are redeemed through a mellow juvenile-court judge and through kinfolk who, on a modest scale, set up every delinquency-preventive, from a kindergarten to machinist's training.

Some of the causes of delinquency are crudely underlined and reiterated; some of the delinquent episodes are dragged in by the hair. It will remain a mystery forever, for instance, just how or why Miss Granville gets killed in a roadhouse brawl. But a memorable amount of adolescent confusion and pain flickers on& off-beam, illuminating its causes with an honesty, economy and poignancy which are rare on the U.S. screen.

Youth Runs Wild is not a very competent film nor, as entertainment, is it likely to be very successful. But it contains elements which are far superior to competence or success. Indeed, the hope for great films in Hollywood seems just now to be shared about evenly by Val Lewton and by Preston Sturges, with the odds, perhaps, on Lewton. Lewton wholly lacks the Sturges brilliance, adroitness and comic gift; he probably hasn't it in him to make a wow. But his feeling for cinema is quite as deep and spontaneous as that of Sturges, and his feeling for human beings, and how to bring them to life on the screen, is deeper.

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